[Findegil]

May be this is the right place to post a text I do not know were to put.
Since the project seems to be taking up some life again, I would liketo give the few snippets I did personally before we left of last time. The plan back then was to review all the parts we had done before starting with something new. To help that process and also to squezze a maximum profit out of it, I thought it would be helpful to writte drafts of the proposed Appendix.
Therefore I started with a kind of introduction text for this Appendix. And the draft for this will follwo here:

Appendix
The Silmarillion Project began as outgrowth of the Books forum of the Barrow-downs in the year 2000 in a thread, wherein Burrahobbit innocently asked the question of 'which books other than the Hobbit/LotR were 'canonical'. As the exploration to this question was near and dear to lindil's heart, he immediatly signed up, posted and what followed was the idea that perhaps since this question had ultimatelty been side-stepped by Cristopher Tolkien with the publication of The Unfinished Tales of Middle-Earth and Numenor and The History of Middle-Earth, an internet forum could tackle not only the question of 'what' is canonical but could perhaps create a new Silmarillion or as it is being called now TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ELVISH - that is a compilation of virtually all of the writings of / pertaining directly to the First, Second, and early to mid Third Ages.

Our situation was aptly in many ways parallel to Bilbo's own Translations from the Elvish [sans real Elves to talk to] in that we have a library:
The History of Middle-Earth Series
The Silmarillion
Unfinished Tales
The Children of Húrin
The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings
Adventures of Tom Bombadil
The Letters
The Road Goes Ever On
The History of the Hobbit
Various articles of J.R.R. Tolkien in the Vinyar Tengwar journal
Various articles of J.R.R. Tolkien in Parma Eldalamberon

Not all of which agree with each other (to put it mildly), present varying depths of treatment, are in a variety of languages and dialects, some are of dubious ‘historical purity' and the quality of writing varies greatly.
From these many and diverse collected writings we have tried to create a compostite narrative of the pre-Lord of the Rings era history of Middle-Earth and Valinor just as Bilbo did using the library of Rivendell.
Some things such as the 'Commentary on the Athrabeth' and most of the linguistic material could not be included, but much was worked into the narrative framework provided by Christopher Tolkien in The Silmarillion (or it's source texts) whenever possible (such as historical / biographical details from 'the Shibboleth of Feanor', the account of the Druedain in Brethil, the story of the awakening of the Elves in 'Quendi and Eldar').
We can of course never have 'The Silmarillion' as J.R.R. Tolkien envisaged it, because major sections were never completed as begun (such as 'Of Tuor and his coming to Gondolin' or the 'Narn I Chîn Húrin' or ‘The Wanderings of Húrin’) and some were left unrevised from the 1930's such as ‘The Ruin of Doriath’ and ‘The Fall of Gondolin’. But we have courtesy of his son Christopher Tolkien The Silmarillion itself, albeit in a somewhat compressed form, and more importantly Unfinished Tales, The Children of Húrin and that vast storehouse of lore, the The History of Middel-Earth series. Some from all of this we are attempting to that which for a variety of reasons Christopher Tolkien did not.
A self-consistent (and Lord of the Rings / The Road Goes Ever On consistent) compendium, primarily in narrative form, of all of the writings that tell the stories from Song of Creation in the ‘Ainulindalë’ to the chance meeting of Thorin and Gandalf at the Prancing Pony in Bree and beyond.
This Appendix attempts to explain how we worked out the text that is presented. Therefore each chapter, which were basicly the entitys we worked with, has its own paragraph here. In it will be given the sources we took our text from and rough procedure how we worked. In addition we will give a summary of the discussions about the more arcane problems we encountered. What normally is not included is a list of the changes of names that we did or a detailed explanation which sentence or phrase or even word was taken from which source. The changes of the names can easily be found in the Index to The History of Middle-Earth. A detailed source information would need as much space (or more) than the text itself. If you are interested in such an information visit the Silmarilion Project section of the Barrow-Downs. There you can still find all the Discussions summarised here in full length and all our working texts, which include the full source information.
This first section of the appendix is the right place to present the rules we developt for the editing process. Even if we present them here as a simple set of rules, don’t belive that they were reached easily. They were fought out in a long and dry discussion, which had not much participants. Nonetheless they were in the end accepated by all and the basis of our work.

1. The first priority is always given to the latest editions of works published during Tolkien's lifetime.
2. Secondary priority is given to the latest ideas found among Tolkien's unpublished texts and letters, except where they:
a. violate the published canon without specifically correcting an error or
b. are proposed changes that do not clearly indicate the exact details that must be changed and how they are to be changed.
3. If no sources that fall under number 2 can be used to form the actual narrative of a section, then any text or summary created by Christopher Tolkien may be used, provided it does not violate the canon established for that section by numbers 1 and 2 above.
4. No new names and no new expressions in Elvish or in any of J.R.R. Tolkien's special languages may be introduced; all names or expressions in J.R.R. Tolkien's special languages that are updated must be changed either in accordance with a universal change by Tolkien or with a logical reason and a sound etymology.
5. Information in sources of lower level priority is to be preferred over information in sources of higher level priority where the item of information in source of higher level priority can be reasonably demonstrated to be an error, whether a "slip of the pen" or from inadequate checking of previous writing.
6. The actual words used by J.R.R. Tolkien or the editor or summarizer of his work may only be changed, including change by deletion or addition, when:
a) they are minimally changed to agree with statements elsewhere in the canon recognized as of greater validity or are replaced with words or phrases from later or alternate restatements of the same material for reasons of consistancy or are changed to agree with alternate phrasings used by Tolkien of the same or better validity
b) they are minimally changed to avoid great awkwardness of expression such as ungrammatical constructions or too great a difference in style from the passage or section/chapter into which they are now to be inserted.
c) they are minimally added to in order to expand a sentence fragments or an incomplete phrase into a construction that fits grammatically in the new environment
d) they are deleted to avoid redundancy in new passages compiled from more than one source
e) they are, in verse passages, minimal changes that do not add new information to the tale, to maintain the proper metre and rhyme or alliterative pattern of the original verse.
7. Personal aesthetics are not to be used in establishing the actual events in the narrative; all changes and decisions must be justified by the above principles, either:
a) with explicit indication; that is, a text of greater precedence contradicting a text of lesser precedence, or
b) with implicit indication that JRRT almost certainly would have changed/deleted it. But we must base this on some evidence or text from JRRT or CJRT; that is, a text of greater precedence suggesting beyond reasonable doubt a contradiction with a text of lesser precedence, or
c) in cases where two options are given precisely equal validity by the above guidelines, by a majority vote based on personal aesthetics and individual opinions.
A corallary is that we may not disregard any text or note, old idea or projected change, by JRRT unless it is invalidated by one of the above principles, explicitly or implicitly; that is, we must have a REASON for rejecting something.

Respectfully
Findegil